I argued in a post a few months ago that Isaiah 2:5 begins a new paragraph of Isaiah 2, rather than concluding the opening section of that chapter. I still think that’s correct, but it is something of a Janus verse that faces backwards too. “Come” in 2:5, addressed to the “house of Jacob,” echoes the exhortation of the nations to “come” to Yahweh’s mountain (2:3). Further, the exhortation in 2:5 is to “walk,” again echoing the exhortation of 2:3,... Read more
Can it be an accident that the word “nation” ( goy ) occurs 73 times in Isaiah? The initial vision of Jerusalem’s restoration includes all nations – goy is used 4x in Isaiah 2:2-4, signalling the global extent of the redemption. And the overall numerology of the word substantiates that global reach: Nations to the four corners will stream to Zion, all the nations, all 70 of them, will learn Yahweh’s torah. Read more
“Forsake” ( ‘azab ) is one of the key words of Isaiah. It is used 22 times in the prophecy, the number of letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Isaiah is an A to Z of forsaking and forsakenness. The word initially appears in charges against Judah, who has forsaken Yahweh (1:4, 28). Through the oracles against the nations, Yahweh warns that he will devastate cities and leave them forsaken (17:2, 9), forsaken like a wilderness for wild birds and animals... Read more
INTRODUCTION The first sequence of five “burdens” of Isaiah begins with Babylon (chs. 13-14) and ends with Egypt (chs. 19-20). Isaiah is working backward in redemptive history, from Judah’s future conqueror to Israel’s earliest slave master. THE TEXT “The burden against Egypt. Behold, the Lord rides on a swift cloud, and will come into Egypt; the idols of Egypt will totter at His presence, and the heart of Egypt will melt in its midst. I will set Egyptians against Egyptians... Read more
Challenged to explain what he means by the notion that the Father “breaths” the Spirit, Jenson writes: “in the Old Testament ruach often appears as the breath of life, and when it is the breath of God’s life it is a creating wind that blows creatures around like leaves in a hurricane. Thus when in the Book of Judges Israel’s history gets stuck, the Spirit falls upon some poor unfortunate and makes him or her the instrument of rescue; that... Read more
In a passionate passage, Farrow enumerates the ways that the church is assaulted for evils that it did more than any other institution to correct – for being misogynist when it “has produced a civilization in which women have enjoyed unprecedented freedom” or for slavery when “for two millennia it has been the primary force of resistance to slaver.” Behind all this is an extraordinary cultural-political coup: “it is not a small thing when the very idea of human rights... Read more
“Insofar as Protestantism denies transubstantiation,” writes Douglas Farrow in Ascension Theology , it collapses into idealism and subjectivism, turns eschatology into utopianism, reduces ecclesiology to secular politics. Without transubstantiation, Protestants appear before God empty-handed, or make the eucharistic offering “something of our own, something offered alongside of Christ rather than in, with, and through Christ. ‘Unholy fire’ upon the altar of God.” A weighty charge, and one with a good deal of truth, but qualified: By transubstantiation, Farrow doesn’t mean... Read more
CB MacPherson argues in his recently reprinted The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Wynford Project) that Hobbes’s view of natural man did not come from study of primitive behavior but from abstracting from the actions of his civilized contemporaries: “Hobbes has got at the ‘natural’ proclivities of men by looking just below the surface of contemporary society, and . . . the state of nature is a two-stage logical abstraction in which man’s natural proclivities are first... Read more
In a nicely nuanced statement, Calvin notes that “there are three modes of insition” [entrance, or grafting] and “two modes of excision.” The modes of entrance into the covenant are: “the children of the faithful are ingrafted, to whom the promise belongs according to the covenant made with the fathers;ingrafted are also they who indeed receive the seed of the gospel, but it strikes no root, or itis choked before it brings any fruit; and thirdly the elect are ingrafted,... Read more
The Belgic Confession (Article 34) has a simply wonderful statement on baptism: “We believe and confess that Jesus Christ, who is the end of the law, made an end, by the shedding of His blood, of all other shedding of blood which men could or would make as a propitiation or satisfaction for sin and that He, having abolished circumcision, which was done with blood, has instituted the sacrament of baptism instead thereof; by which we are received into the... Read more
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